Jaiku is the New Twitter
By “Jaiku is the new Twitter”, we’re hardly suggesting it is a popular new microblogging site that may overtake the reigning king. No, that ship has sailed. We mean it never works anymore. Twitter seems to have been spending cash found during its recent funding round very well. It made a few key hires, sought a bit of outside help and now downtime is a thing of the past (for now at least). On the other hand you have Jaiku, the young scrapper with a promising future cut short by a Google acquisition. Let’s take a look at what we’ve seen from Jaiku since it was snatched up by the big G:
- Registration closed, invite only
- A huge spike in traffic, followed by a huge drop-off
- Server issues
- Downtime
- Moved to Google Apps engine
- Server issues
- Downtime
It becomes quite apparent that Google isn’t all too interested in the present community aspects of Jaiku. Instead, it has been hypothesized that Google was likely more interested in Jaiku’s mobile presence applications; a live phone book of sorts where users can view the status of each of their contacts and even post messages and replies from right within the app. Sounds like something that might be a pretty interesting addition to Android, no? Whether or not this is the case, it seems to be a fair assumption that Google doesn’t have much interest in the current Jaiku users. The service has been up and down all week and now users have been informed via the screen capture above, that Jaiku will be taking a vacation all weekend. As the message on Jaiku’s homepage suggests, now is probably a good time for Jaiku users to find other ways to communicate.
Wow, they can’t even be bothered with the failbird even – at this moment in time it just spits out a 502 error page from nginx.
Real professional, Google.
Um no. Rejaw FTW. 1. Real time updates 2. embeddable media 3. hardly ANY redundancy 4. dev team is AWESOME. Jaiku is a hot mess compared to them
Jaiku hasn’t been moved to Google Apps Engine yet. That is probably why it is down for this weekend.
What’s with the Fail Finch?
Neither a bird or a whale makes me feel better when I see the page down. Maybe a two-minute mystery or something would be better.
System wide Google services have seen interruptions and etc all this week including gmail.com
The bigger story here is the growing pains of their cloud computing system. IE what thigns are they learning that can be applied to future service issues and etc?
For Jaiku to be Twitter they’d have to be working and gaining users in the first place. They’ve been dead for at least 6 months. A gigantic failure.
Gigantic failure? What’s your criteria? If the founders’ goal was to build a social network that would showcase their technology and lead to a major acquisition, I’d say it was a pretty massive success.
Jaiku have not moved to Google App Engine yet but they are about too. You may have given up up on them but I would be prepared to proven wrong when they relaunch on the GAE after the weekend.
I can’t really speak for Jaiku,… but I can say that many bands and promoters and businesses and online marketers have downloaded and are already using the new (already famous) twitter genius software that I know a lot of you musicians have heard so much about, but twitterblaster.com now offers it as a BETA version and now,… having used it myself (for non-music promotion),…I can’t tell you just how great it is. I used to manage a band about 8 years ago but don’t anymore. Now I work as a professional online marketer in Orlando, FL.
Many of you “pure” micro-bloggers will jump all over me because of saying these things, but in my past experience, most bands and promoters wonder how to effectively accomplish “cloud” marketing on the internet. how do you get even the name of your band in front of 20,000 – 40,000 people in key markets? As everyone knows, Twitter is full of people micro-blogging, many of whom tweet with statements like “Listening to ‘Hard to Handle’ by ‘The Black Crowes’…” or equivalent tweets about the music they happen to be listening to.
But can you imagine if a LOT of people on Twitter all started “mentioning” that they were listening to your band?
Can you imagine what would happen if 10 people with twitter accounts all started mentioning that they were listening to your song all within the same 4 hour period? What if all 10 people had 400 followers? (Very common for most users on Twitter as we all know)… that would be 4000 followers that would all be seeing the name of your song and the name of your band.
But what if instead of 10 people with 400 followers, it was 100 people with 500 followers? 50,000 people all hearing about your band,… and yes… a widespread mention like this would (and does) kick off a twitter trend that you could measure on tweetgrid.com and alos at your band’s website.
Do you know of ANY band who would want their name and song exposed directly to 40,000 people who actively had SUBSCRIBED to follow someone else’s taste in music because they were interested and would probably play a new song that came along?
Well… what I just described is now happening. In fact, the software to do it just became available less than a month ago and not only my e-marketing firm that I work for, but many, many people are cashing in on the promotional value… but I can’t think of any branding better suited for this type of ternd-generating machine than bands. twitterblaster.com was practically built for bands and musicians in my opinion.
Just like everything, evetually Twitter will recognize the exploit and will start locking things down, but at least in the forseeable future, things look bright for bands and promoters who want to go this route.
Normally I lecture at UCF about the new social community online marketing tools and trends, but I figured I would post this here at Sonicbids as a freebie.
I hope someone finds good success with this technique! I know we have! (Our firm represents affiliate programs which are pretty much the lamest type of sale on the internet and even so,… after we started using twitterblaster.com… we have averaged a 25% increase in sales on ALL of our programs… so I can only imagine what it would do for a band trying to get their name out there)…
Best Wishes All You Rockstars!
With Love,
Amanda McCallister
P.S. – There’s actually a pretty decent tutorial here… http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TY-e4zSuuJc …where some guy has demo’d some of the functions. If you can get past his nasal voice and rather massive ego, it’s really a pretty good look at it.